People magazine reportedly paid $14 million for the rights to publish the first pictures of the twin babies of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. But what the blogosphere is buzzing about is the suspicion that the cover photo of the twins was photoshopped.
New York magazine seems to be the originator of this theory:
In that cover photo, it looks like Vivienne Marcheline — clearly the Ashley half of this Olsen-like combo — is sporting a giant grin. She may even be laughing. Hold on. These babies are purported to be a mere 3 weeks old! Parenting magazine says that
babies don't smile from exterior stimulation until two to four months — even if said exterior stimulation is the most beautiful pair of humans in the entire world.
The picture could very well be photoshopped. Most magazine covers are nowadays. But to me it simply looks like the baby happened to have its mouth open.
Comments
Jocelynn used to laugh in her sleep as a newborn.
The smiles & laughs were totally random. Sometimes they would be alone in their crib/bassinet. Other times I would be moving them from one shoulder to another & it would happen.
My daughters have both had kids this past month, and I can get them both to smile, all I have to do is look at them and talk to them in my silly granny voice, and give them smooches on their face and neck.
Some baby's are just born happy to start with.
My babies both smiled from the get-go, too. I'm not convinced it was as an expression of happiness or anything though - when I tried to be objective it seemed a little too unconnected with stimuli. Obviously the desire that it be so sets thie scene for a nice bit of confirmation bias to come into play!
OTOH, you never get a magazine cover that's NOT been photoshopped to some degree... It's perfectly possible that the photog got lucky enough to catch a 'smile' (given the rate at which pros take photos the smile would only have needed to be there for half a second), but the chances that a photo editor helped things along are pretty good too.
I expect that the photographer for the magazine just stood there and took about fifty billion pictures from all sorts of different angles, and he just got lucky and snapped this picture where the one baby is making that expression. There are probably tons of unused pictures from the photo session that didn't make it and are sitting in some filing cabinet.